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Discrimination by design: A feminist critique of the man-made environment
474
Book Reviews
HEAVENLY LOVE? LESBIAN IMAGES IN TWENTIETHCENTURY WOMEN'S WRITING,by Gabriele Griffin, 202 pages. Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1993.
Gabriele Griffin's book traces the ways in which some lesbians have been represented in the course of the present century. Griffin's text is divided into seven chapters. The first three chapters as well as the last are linked by the segmentations of linear time, whereas the rest of the chapters are thematically organised. Chapter l, for example, deals with earlier twentieth-century literary representations of the "lonely lesbian" while Chapter 7 is given over to images of "older lesbians" in more contemporary times. On the other hand, Chapter 4 is devoted to dreaming about lesbian worlds while Chapter 6 attempts to discuss lesbian sexuality. Writing from a consistently British perspective, Griffin chooses to base her study of "lesbian images" on several British works (such as those by Radclyffe Hall and Jeanette Winterson), some North American texts (such as works by Pat Califia and Adrienne Rich) and one work coauthored by Monique Wittig and Sandra Zeig. Although Griffin is selective about whose works she engages with, she is, at the same time, bound by the nature of her project to draw larger conclusions. This constitutes an intricate juggling act given that there is always the finest of lines between making a fair enough general point and an overgeneralisation. To make matters even more complicated, Griffin's project ranges over an immense timeframe - - that of a 100 years. Arguably, the most unproblematic section of Heavenly Love? is Chapter 7, " ' . . . When I'm Sixty-four': Images of Older Lesbians." Unproblematic because it is a straightforward celebration of the persistence of desire into middle age and beyond. This chapter foregrounds several other important themes as well - - such as intergenerational relationships, illness, and mortality. The chapter also serves as a reminder that there is life and sex after menopause. Additionally, it makes a case as to why older lesbians are very sexy. Perhaps, the most contentious stretch of Heavenly Love? occurs in Chapter 6, "Wet Caves and Roses: Representations of Lesbian Sexuality in Women's Writings." Kudos goes to Griffin for her courage in stating her views unequivocally on an aspect of lesbian sexuality, that of SAM. Referring specifically to Pat Califia's Macho Sluts, Griffin spells out her main objections to SAM. However, the debate would have been a fuller one if Griffin had dealt with the opposing arguments less cursorily and/or signalled that the controversy over SAM is far from over. No doubt others have argued a case contrary to Griffin's, perhaps, even using very much the same grounds that she does, but reading from the intertwined perspectives of mimesis, performance, and subversion. To put it in another way, excess and limit are troubling but irreducibly-doubled twins. Griffin also touches on the links between Western in/articulation and sexuality. She points to sexuality being a taboo topic in Western culture, and hence, the relative silence surrounding it. She also argues that Hall's off-quoted minimalist line on lesbian sexuality (The Well of Loneliness) is in keeping with the parallel silence concerning sexual desire and expression in heterosexual texts of that period in Britain. Although these are valid and defensible observations, they need to be taken further. For example, a foray into Western philosophy, theories of language and psychoanalytic thought would yield deeper insights
into the relationship between language and sexuality or the mind/body dichotomy in Western culture. I have in mind the appropriate works of writers such as Julia Kristeva, Elizabeth Grosz, and Teresa de Lauretis (to name a few). Furthermore, if language is powered by negation as much as difference, then the gap between the expression of desire (including its sexual manifestations) and language may be inevitable rather than lamentable. In any case, there are contrasting and even contradictory ways of theorising what "silence" signifies in the textualisation of the acts of love. To be sure, Heavenly Love? is an addition to the growing documentation of the lesbian as discursive subject. Moreover, Griffin provides her reader with compressed readings of a selection of women-authored texts. SOOKCHIN KONG DEPARTMENTOF ENGLISH UNIVERSITYOF VICTORIA VICFOmA,BRmSH COLUMBIA,CANADA
DISCRIMINATION BY DESIGN: A FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF THE MAN-MADE ENVIRONMENT, by Leslie Kanes Weisman, 190 pages. University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1994.
"On New Year's Eve of 1971 . . . seventy-five women took over an abandoned building owned by the city of New York" (p. 1). They issued a statement that expressed their anger and their determination to "put into action with women those things essential to women" (p. 1), and set an agenda for women's claims to space and rights to the city. Ten years later, Leslie Kanes Weisman drew on that experience to outline a Manifesto for Women's Environmental Rights (Heresies, 11, 1981). In it she wrote: Be it affirmed . . . . One of the most important tasks of the w o m e n ' s movement is to make visible the full meaning of our experiences and to reinterpret and restructure the built environment in those terms. We will not create fully supportive, life-enhancing environments until our society values those aspects of human experience that have been devalued through the oppression of women, and we must work with each other to achieve this. (p. 8) Weisman's book, another 10 years on, still bums with that anger and that resolve to affirm the importance of the built environment in movements for changing society. She describes in detail aspects of the built environment and its design, which constrain women's freedom and disadvantage them in everyday life. She begins with outlining the importance of the symbolic universe of patriarchal norms that devalue "feminine" attributes and qualities. This mythology translates into the symbolism of the office tower, the department store, and the shopping mall, and the alienating environment of the maternity hospital. City streets define a sexual geography: "good girls" don't go out at night alone, don't go to certain parts of town, aren't homeless on the streets. Pornography and the portrayal of violence in the media reinforce male domination of space and male "rights" to harrass women who venture out of their precribed times and places. But women are not "at home" in domestic space either. Whether because of domestic violence, or because of low income or the effects of racial prejudice, increas-
Book Reviews
ing numbers of women are deprived of the security and privacy of "home." Broader-scale urban policy and planning regulations also ill-serve the interests of women. Zoning (in its U.S. manifestations) controls the types of people sharing housing and actively excludes specific racial, cultural, or sexual social groups. American suburban housing does not suit the needs of people who do not fit the stereotypical nuclear family norm. It is a by-now familiar and depressing story. However, Weisman is very much a feminist activist (and indeed, an optimist) and she has examples of what has been done to oveahrow the tyranny of the male-made environment. She documents the designs of alternative birthing centres and flexible h o u s i n g ; she d e s c r i b e s R e c l a i m the N i g h t , antipornography marches, and Safe City campaigns; she explores women's fantasies of their ideal environments and speculates on how to bring them to fruition; she insists on the importance of space and the design of the built environment and the role of feminist architects and planners in any liberatory projects "to design a society in which all people matter" (p. 179). I want very much to like this book and, indeed, it has a lot to offer feminist and community architects in particular. My overwhelming impression, however, is that it is 10 years late. Statistics from the 1970s and early 1980s could quite easily have been updated before publication, but more significantly, the great majority of the references cited were also published in the 1970s and 1980s. W e i s m a n ' s analysis does not take into account the exciting work being done in feminist philosophy and social
475
theory and in feminist and cultural geography. This latter work, drawing poststructuralist theory and discourse analysis, brings richer and more nuanced understandings to the study of "difference" and begins to unravel the complex, multidirectional interdependencies of space and power. Much of this work is based in understandings of the multiple inequalities of capitalist society, another aspect of the problem of contemporary urban development largely lacking in Weisman's accounts of a monolithic and all-pervading patriarchy. Weisman's insistence on the importance of female-centred design is both the weakness and the strength of her book. On the one hand, it tends to imply - - despite her riders to the contrary - - that there can be physical solutions to complex social problems. She describes these problems vividly, but because problems occur in the city, or the built environment, it does not necessarily mean they are problems o f the city/man-made environment. The built environment is at once symptom and cause. On the other hand, in documenting women's unflagging activism in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds, in stressing the importance of the built environment in our daily experience as women, and, particularly, in pointing the practice of architecture toward a feminist social conscience, Weisman's book is an unequivocal manifesto of the need for change. MARGOHUXLEY DEPARTMENTOF PLANNING,POLICYAND LANDSCAPE UNIVERSITY AUSTRALIA
Book Reviews
HEAVENLY LOVE? LESBIAN IMAGES IN TWENTIETHCENTURY WOMEN'S WRITING,by Gabriele Griffin, 202 pages. Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1993.
Gabriele Griffin's book traces the ways in which some lesbians have been represented in the course of the present century. Griffin's text is divided into seven chapters. The first three chapters as well as the last are linked by the segmentations of linear time, whereas the rest of the chapters are thematically organised. Chapter l, for example, deals with earlier twentieth-century literary representations of the "lonely lesbian" while Chapter 7 is given over to images of "older lesbians" in more contemporary times. On the other hand, Chapter 4 is devoted to dreaming about lesbian worlds while Chapter 6 attempts to discuss lesbian sexuality. Writing from a consistently British perspective, Griffin chooses to base her study of "lesbian images" on several British works (such as those by Radclyffe Hall and Jeanette Winterson), some North American texts (such as works by Pat Califia and Adrienne Rich) and one work coauthored by Monique Wittig and Sandra Zeig. Although Griffin is selective about whose works she engages with, she is, at the same time, bound by the nature of her project to draw larger conclusions. This constitutes an intricate juggling act given that there is always the finest of lines between making a fair enough general point and an overgeneralisation. To make matters even more complicated, Griffin's project ranges over an immense timeframe - - that of a 100 years. Arguably, the most unproblematic section of Heavenly Love? is Chapter 7, " ' . . . When I'm Sixty-four': Images of Older Lesbians." Unproblematic because it is a straightforward celebration of the persistence of desire into middle age and beyond. This chapter foregrounds several other important themes as well - - such as intergenerational relationships, illness, and mortality. The chapter also serves as a reminder that there is life and sex after menopause. Additionally, it makes a case as to why older lesbians are very sexy. Perhaps, the most contentious stretch of Heavenly Love? occurs in Chapter 6, "Wet Caves and Roses: Representations of Lesbian Sexuality in Women's Writings." Kudos goes to Griffin for her courage in stating her views unequivocally on an aspect of lesbian sexuality, that of SAM. Referring specifically to Pat Califia's Macho Sluts, Griffin spells out her main objections to SAM. However, the debate would have been a fuller one if Griffin had dealt with the opposing arguments less cursorily and/or signalled that the controversy over SAM is far from over. No doubt others have argued a case contrary to Griffin's, perhaps, even using very much the same grounds that she does, but reading from the intertwined perspectives of mimesis, performance, and subversion. To put it in another way, excess and limit are troubling but irreducibly-doubled twins. Griffin also touches on the links between Western in/articulation and sexuality. She points to sexuality being a taboo topic in Western culture, and hence, the relative silence surrounding it. She also argues that Hall's off-quoted minimalist line on lesbian sexuality (The Well of Loneliness) is in keeping with the parallel silence concerning sexual desire and expression in heterosexual texts of that period in Britain. Although these are valid and defensible observations, they need to be taken further. For example, a foray into Western philosophy, theories of language and psychoanalytic thought would yield deeper insights
into the relationship between language and sexuality or the mind/body dichotomy in Western culture. I have in mind the appropriate works of writers such as Julia Kristeva, Elizabeth Grosz, and Teresa de Lauretis (to name a few). Furthermore, if language is powered by negation as much as difference, then the gap between the expression of desire (including its sexual manifestations) and language may be inevitable rather than lamentable. In any case, there are contrasting and even contradictory ways of theorising what "silence" signifies in the textualisation of the acts of love. To be sure, Heavenly Love? is an addition to the growing documentation of the lesbian as discursive subject. Moreover, Griffin provides her reader with compressed readings of a selection of women-authored texts. SOOKCHIN KONG DEPARTMENTOF ENGLISH UNIVERSITYOF VICTORIA VICFOmA,BRmSH COLUMBIA,CANADA
DISCRIMINATION BY DESIGN: A FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF THE MAN-MADE ENVIRONMENT, by Leslie Kanes Weisman, 190 pages. University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1994.
"On New Year's Eve of 1971 . . . seventy-five women took over an abandoned building owned by the city of New York" (p. 1). They issued a statement that expressed their anger and their determination to "put into action with women those things essential to women" (p. 1), and set an agenda for women's claims to space and rights to the city. Ten years later, Leslie Kanes Weisman drew on that experience to outline a Manifesto for Women's Environmental Rights (Heresies, 11, 1981). In it she wrote: Be it affirmed . . . . One of the most important tasks of the w o m e n ' s movement is to make visible the full meaning of our experiences and to reinterpret and restructure the built environment in those terms. We will not create fully supportive, life-enhancing environments until our society values those aspects of human experience that have been devalued through the oppression of women, and we must work with each other to achieve this. (p. 8) Weisman's book, another 10 years on, still bums with that anger and that resolve to affirm the importance of the built environment in movements for changing society. She describes in detail aspects of the built environment and its design, which constrain women's freedom and disadvantage them in everyday life. She begins with outlining the importance of the symbolic universe of patriarchal norms that devalue "feminine" attributes and qualities. This mythology translates into the symbolism of the office tower, the department store, and the shopping mall, and the alienating environment of the maternity hospital. City streets define a sexual geography: "good girls" don't go out at night alone, don't go to certain parts of town, aren't homeless on the streets. Pornography and the portrayal of violence in the media reinforce male domination of space and male "rights" to harrass women who venture out of their precribed times and places. But women are not "at home" in domestic space either. Whether because of domestic violence, or because of low income or the effects of racial prejudice, increas-
Book Reviews
ing numbers of women are deprived of the security and privacy of "home." Broader-scale urban policy and planning regulations also ill-serve the interests of women. Zoning (in its U.S. manifestations) controls the types of people sharing housing and actively excludes specific racial, cultural, or sexual social groups. American suburban housing does not suit the needs of people who do not fit the stereotypical nuclear family norm. It is a by-now familiar and depressing story. However, Weisman is very much a feminist activist (and indeed, an optimist) and she has examples of what has been done to oveahrow the tyranny of the male-made environment. She documents the designs of alternative birthing centres and flexible h o u s i n g ; she d e s c r i b e s R e c l a i m the N i g h t , antipornography marches, and Safe City campaigns; she explores women's fantasies of their ideal environments and speculates on how to bring them to fruition; she insists on the importance of space and the design of the built environment and the role of feminist architects and planners in any liberatory projects "to design a society in which all people matter" (p. 179). I want very much to like this book and, indeed, it has a lot to offer feminist and community architects in particular. My overwhelming impression, however, is that it is 10 years late. Statistics from the 1970s and early 1980s could quite easily have been updated before publication, but more significantly, the great majority of the references cited were also published in the 1970s and 1980s. W e i s m a n ' s analysis does not take into account the exciting work being done in feminist philosophy and social
475
theory and in feminist and cultural geography. This latter work, drawing poststructuralist theory and discourse analysis, brings richer and more nuanced understandings to the study of "difference" and begins to unravel the complex, multidirectional interdependencies of space and power. Much of this work is based in understandings of the multiple inequalities of capitalist society, another aspect of the problem of contemporary urban development largely lacking in Weisman's accounts of a monolithic and all-pervading patriarchy. Weisman's insistence on the importance of female-centred design is both the weakness and the strength of her book. On the one hand, it tends to imply - - despite her riders to the contrary - - that there can be physical solutions to complex social problems. She describes these problems vividly, but because problems occur in the city, or the built environment, it does not necessarily mean they are problems o f the city/man-made environment. The built environment is at once symptom and cause. On the other hand, in documenting women's unflagging activism in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds, in stressing the importance of the built environment in our daily experience as women, and, particularly, in pointing the practice of architecture toward a feminist social conscience, Weisman's book is an unequivocal manifesto of the need for change. MARGOHUXLEY DEPARTMENTOF PLANNING,POLICYAND LANDSCAPE UNIVERSITY AUSTRALIA